75 research outputs found
The Lindy Effect
The Lindy effect is a statistical tendency for things with longer pasts
behind them to have longer futures ahead. It has been experimentally confirmed
to apply to some categories, but not others, raising questions about when it is
applicable and why. I shed some light on these questions by examining the
mathematical properties required for the effect and generating mechanisms that
can produce them. While the Lindy effect is often thought to require a
declining hazard rate, I show that it arises very naturally even in cases with
constant (or increasing) hazard rates -- so long as there is a probability
distribution over the size of that rate. One implication is that even things
which are becoming less robust over time can display the Lindy effect.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure
Probing the Improbable: Methodological Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stakes
Some risks have extremely high stakes. For example, a worldwide pandemic or
asteroid impact could potentially kill more than a billion people.
Comfortingly, scientific calculations often put very low probabilities on the
occurrence of such catastrophes. In this paper, we argue that there are
important new methodological problems which arise when assessing global
catastrophic risks and we focus on a problem regarding probability estimation.
When an expert provides a calculation of the probability of an outcome, they
are really providing the probability of the outcome occurring, given that their
argument is watertight. However, their argument may fail for a number of
reasons such as a flaw in the underlying theory, a flaw in the modeling of the
problem, or a mistake in the calculations. If the probability estimate given by
an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then
the estimate is suspect. We develop this idea formally, explaining how it
differs from the related distinctions of model and parameter uncertainty. Using
the risk estimates from the Large Hadron Collider as a test case, we show how
serious the problem can be when it comes to catastrophic risks and how best to
address it
Beyond action: applying consequentialism to decision making and motivation
It is often said that there are three great traditions of normative ethics: consequentialism,
deontology, and virtue ethics. Each is based around a compelling intuition about the nature
of ethics: that what is ultimately important is that we produce the best possible outcome, that
ethics is a system of rules which govern our behaviour, and that ethics is about living a life
that instantiates the virtues, such as honesty, compassion and loyalty. This essay is about how
best to interpret consequentialism. I show that if we take consequentialism beyond the
assessment of acts, using a consequentialist criterion to assess decision making, motivation,
and character, then the resulting theory can also capture many of the intuitions about
systems of moral rules and excellences of character that lead people to deontology and virtue
ethics.
I begin by considering the argument that consequentialism is self-defeating because its
adoption would produce bad outcomes. I take up the response offered by the classical
utilitarians: when properly construed, consequentialism does not require us to make our
decisions by a form of naïve calculation, or to be motivated purely by universal benevolence.
Instead it requires us to use the decision procedure that will produce the best outcome and to
have the motives that lead to the best outcome. I take this idea as my starting point, and
spend the thesis developing it and considering its implications.
I demonstrate that neither act-consequentialism nor rule-consequentialism has the resources
to adequately assess decision making and motivation. I therefore turn to the idea of global
consequentialism, which assesses everything in terms of its consequences. I then spend the
greater part of the essay exploring how best to set up such a theory and how best to apply it
to decision making and motivation. I overcome some important objections to the approach,
and conclude by showing how the resulting approach to consequentialism helps to bridge the
divide between the three traditions
Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex
ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the
apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the
universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the
Drake equation, which suggest that even if the probability of intelligent life
developing at a given site is small, the sheer multitude of possible sites
should nonetheless yield a large number of potentially observable
civilizations. We show that this conflict arises from the use of Drake-like
equations, which implicitly assume certainty regarding highly uncertain
parameters. We examine these parameters, incorporating models of chemical and
genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, and show that extant
scientific knowledge corresponds to uncertainties that span multiple orders of
magnitude. This makes a stark difference. When the model is recast to represent
realistic distributions of uncertainty, we find a substantial {\em ex ante}
probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable
universe, and thus that there should be little surprise when we fail to detect
any signs of it. This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so
removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which civilizations would
inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A; 4
supplement
Years of Good Life Based on Income and Health: Re-Engineering Cost-Benefit Analysis to Examine Policy Impact on Wellbeing and Distributive Justice
- …